Ungoverning the climate

In this article I canvass four kinds or ‘modes’ of ungovernance, which I characterise as agnostic, experimental, inoculative, and catastrophic. I then turn to climate change, and the questions of climate governance and climate equity, which, I argue, exemplify each of these four modes in different ways. The fact of climate change might be characterised as the materialisation of ungovernance, insofar as it is the incidental or accidental outcome of an aggregate of rational decisions underpinned by a vast but selective regulatory apparatus. But more poignantly, the international law apparatus that has grown up around the climate problem presumes and embeds uncertainty regarding any resolution.